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The Study of 
Nineteenth Century Diplomacy 

An Inaugural Lecture delivered before 

the University of Liverpool 

on Friday, 10 December 1914 



BY 



C. K. WEBSTER, M.A. 

PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY 



LONDON 

G, BELL AND SONS, LTD. 

1915 

Price \s. net 



The Study of 

Nineteenth Century Diplomacy 



An Inaugural Lecture delivered before 

the University of Liverpool 

on Friday, 10 December 1914 



BY 



C. K. WEBSTER, M.A. 

PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY 



LONDON 
G. BELL AND SONS, LTD. 

1915 






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The Study of 
Nineteenth Century Diplomacy 

OUR first thoughts on such an occasion 
as this should be of the past rather 
than the present or the future. It 
would, however, be impertinent of one of my 
years and experience to attempt to appraise the 
work of my distinguished predecessor in this 
Chair. Its record is written in the School of 
Modern History which he created, and his great 
influence, not only in the University but in the 
city of which it is a part, has been fittingly re- 
cognized in the Ramsay Muir Fellowship which 
generous friends and colleagues have founded 
to perpetuate his name among us, and help for- 
ward the cause for which he did so much. Yet 
it would be ungrateful of me to forbear from 
acknowledging my own debt to him. It was 
from his lectures that I first learnt that the 
study of modern history could be made illumin- 
ating, inspiring, and important. That same 

3 



4 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

faith he has given to many more since then, 
and I need not say how much I value the privi- 
lege and how keenly I realize the responsibility 
of succeeding him in this Chair. 

Now the work which has been done so brilli- 
antly and successfully in this University has had 
its counterpart throughout the whole academic 
life of the British nation. It is perhaps not too 
much to claim that no other subject of purely 
academic character has made so much progress 
in the new century. In the public schools the 
old conceptions of a classical education are fast 
breaking down, and in the secondary schools 
the danger of paying too much attention to the 
demands of science and commerce has been real- 
ized. In both cases the claims of modern history 
have begun to be recognized ; its place as an 
instrument of education in the hands of trained 
and informed teachers has at last been more 
clearly seen ; and its power to interest and in- 
spire youth has secured for it an impregnable 
position in our educational system. This change 
has only been made possible by great develop- 
ments in our Universities, by which the schools 
have been supplied with men and women who 
have been trained in the subject they intend to 
teach. The process is far from complete. There 
is still a tradition that anyone who has failed to 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 5 

teach other subjects is still fit to give historical 
instruction. But much progress has been made, 
and soon it may be hoped that all the youth of 
England will find as much education and stimu- 
lus in studying the history of modern Europe, 
as a favoured few have found in the history of 
the Ancient World. 

But as school teaching depends upon Uni- 
versity training, so the latter depends on the 
University prosecuting continuously and steadily 
the work of investigation and research alongside 
of its other duties. Here, too, there has been 
much progress in recent years, but it must be 
confessed that this work has not kept pace with 
the demands made upon it. The great English 
historians of the last century did indeed do much 
to reveal to Englishmen the ordered growth and 
development of their institutions. But many of 
them were distinguished amateurs, and for the 
most part they taught few the secret of their 
own success. Moreover, the sphere of their 
activity was, with one or two notable exceptions, 
limited and confined. They were interested in 
the history of their own country, but they re- 
flected the insular character of the Victorian 
Era. So far as they made incursions into a 
wider field it was generally the mediaeval rather 
than the modern age that attracted their at- 
tention, and the close connection between their 



6 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

own history and that of their neighbours was 
neglected by them as by the nation as a whole. 
After the close of the Napoleonic struggle the 
English people for long regarded itself as one 
specially chosen and endowed with a political 
intelligence vouchsafed to no other country. 
Though often intensely interested in certain 
phases of European politics, and especially in 
the struggle of other countries for national and 
constitutional freedom, it was content to remain 
ignorant of the events which had produced a 
captive Greece, a disunited Italy, or a dis- 
membered Poland. In the same way English 
historians forgot to a large extent the tradition 
of Gibbon and Robertson, and we have no one in 
the nineteenth century who can compare with 
Ranke. Towards the close of the century that 
phase was already passing. The influence of 
Lord Acton, the pupil of Ranke, began to make 
itself felt, and to him, who knew the history, 
the literature, and the philosophy of nearly all 
European countries, insularity was a thing of 
horror. But the chief influence came from with- 
out rather than from within, and the process is 
not yet complete. 

Closely allied to this insularity of outlook was 
the neglect of recent history. It was not until 
the twentieth century was close at hand that 
any real attempt was made to portray the great 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 7 

part which England had played in the struggle 
against Napoleon. Military history we indeed 
possessed, but we had no one to compare with 
Thiers or Sybel, and for half a century the 
English people, so far as it concerned itself 
with the matter at all, founded its conceptions 
of Napoleon on Alison's ponderous volumes. 
Nor as the century proceeded was there an at- 
tempt made to record its wonderful progress. 
We have still no counterpart to the Staaten- 
geschichte der neuesten Zeit, in which as long 
ago as 1870, German historians began a scien- 
tific survey of the political history of the century, 
and to this day we possess no work founded 
on our own archives which attempts to record 
our connection with the great developments in 
European history in the course of the last 
hundred years. It is true, of course, that a 
certain amount of time must elapse before 
events can be treated by the ordinary methods 
of history, and the later part of the nineteenth 
century is still too near us for its history to be 
written. But the rate of change has been so 
great in the nineteenth century, that we do 
not need to wait so long as our fathers did. 
A greater gulf separates us from the age of 
Palmerston than divided his age from that of 
Walpole. Civilization has altered, if not pro- 
gressed, at an ever increasing rate. If it is also 



8 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

true, as Lord Acton has said, that "the recent 
past contains the key to the present time," then 
for Englishmen of the twentieth century, the 
history that is most worth studying- is that of 
the nineteenth century, and few will, I think, be 
concerned to deny that its proper understanding 
is of vital importance for us to-day. Recent 
experience has made this fact abundantly clear. 
It is not long since that it became necessary for 
us to reconsider the whole structure of our 
constitution, and, while this was being done, 
Englishmen suddenly realized that they had 
much to learn from the institutions of foreign 
countries. But in England no school of Political 
Science existed ; there was no body of scientific 
knowledge to which appeal could be made; and 
the appalling ignorance of modern constitutional 
developments which was displayed by almost 
every politician of eminence, was but a reflection 
of the ignorance of the whole nation. The hastily 
constructed books which poured forth from every 
publishing house were but a poor substitute for 
the body of ordered and digested information 
which the academic world ought to have been 
able to furnish to the men of action. 

In the same way a far graver crisis has forced 
us to consider in a new light the principles and 
character of our foreign policy; but you will 
look in vain for the books which can teach Eng- 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 9 

lishmen the connection of their own country 
with the political life of the Continent during 
the nineteenth century. Such books cannot be 
improvised on the spur of the moment in the 
midst of a great national crisis. Work that has 
been neglected in the past cannot suddenly be 
called into being. We possess no great history 
of the nineteenth century. We may perhaps be 
thought fortunate in the fact that we have had no 
Treitschke. But our criticisms of Treitschke 
would now have more weight if any Englishman 
had attempted to do for the history of his own 
country what Treitschke did for his. Few will dis- 
pute the fact that the study of our diplomatic his- 
tory in the past century is of real and immediate 
importance to-day. Yet that work has scarcely 
been begun. There is, for example, as yet no 
adequate record of the part England played 
in the great reconstruction of Europe after the 
Napoleonic Wars, though for the last thirty years 
the materials for such a study have been at the 
disposal of historians. Yet if our foreign policy 
is to be really that of the nation, it can only be 
successful if it be that of a nation instructed and 
informed, and no text books or pamphlets will 
supply it with the information that it needs, un- 
less the preliminary work of scientific investiga- 
tion be also adequately carried out. It is to the 
possibilities of such a study, and the methods 



io NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

by which it can be pursued, that I wish to direct 
your attention to-day. 

Now though the principles of historical science 
are the same, whether applied to ancient, to medi- 
aeval, or to modern history, yet they have to be 
adapted to different kinds of materials and different 
sorts of problems. In this sense the study of nine- 
teenth century history, and in particular the study 
of nineteenth century diplomacy, may be con- 
sidered in some sort by itself, for its materials 
and its problems differ considerably from those 
of other centuries. In the first place, the distance 
in time which separates the historian from the 
events he has to study is small, and though, as 
I have pointed out, this difficulty can be exag- 
gerated, yet it is true that it makes him more 
likely, consciously or unconsciously, to write with 
national or party bias. This fact is so well recog- 
nized, that no one seems to expect that a historian 
can deal justly with the affairs of his own and 
other countries. Such phrases as "even French 
historians admit," or " English writers have a 
difficult task in defending this policy," which 
occur frequently in works on modern history, 
show that impartiality is assumed to be an un- 
attainable ideal. It is even argued that by such 
methods the cause of truth will eventually be 
served, and that she will emerge, somehow or 
other, triumphant from the conflict. It is un- 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY u 

deniably true that prejudiced history is popu- 
lar, whether the prejudice be that of party or 
country, and that work has sometimes been done 
under the stress of such an emotion that would 
never have been attempted had it been absent. 
Treitschke's massive volumes, founded on an im- 
mense amount of evidence garnered from many 
archives, escaped the fate of so many German 
histories, because of the fierce spirit of patriotism 
that makes them live. Yet history has higher 
aims than his, and it will make but slow progress 
if it adopts his methods. Die Weltgeschicte ist 
das Weltgericht. But sentence must be pro- 
nounced; and what sort of a judgment can we ex- 
pect if advocates sit on the bench? Fortunately, 
in the twentieth century, the conception that no 
historian has the right to be a patriot, and that 
he will serve best the interests of his own country, 
if he try only to serve the interests of truth, has 
gained considerable ground. Nothing, for ex- 
ample, has done more to remove misunderstand- 
ing between this country and the United States 
than the gradual recognition by historians on 
both sides of the Atlantic that national bias 
could be safely and usefully abandoned. The in- 
fluence of Lord Acton had begun to make itself 
felt, not only in this country, but in many others, 
and there have been signs that, wherever aca- 
demic work could be carried out, free from state 



12 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

control or interference, historians were returning" 
to the ideals of Ranke and his school. How far 
progress will now be checked, it is impossible 
to say. But even if the value of historical work 
be lowered by false ideals of patriotism, it is yet 
better that it should be done badly than not done 
at all. The difficulty increases indeed the re- 
sponsibility of the historians of every country. 
No country can afford to neglect the study of its 
own foreign policy, without taking - the risk that 
its ideals will be misunderstood and misconstrued. 
We must hope for an enlightened patriotism. 

But this difficulty, the immensity of which I 
confess and can only deplore, is common in some 
degree to all history. The chief difference be- 
tween the study of nineteenth century history and 
that of all other periods lies in the immense 
quantity of materials available to the historian. 
Its sources may be assumed to be so much greater 
than those of all other centuries that we are con- 
fronted with a new problem. One of the main 
features of the nineteenth century is the multipli- 
cation of the records of their work which men 
have left behind them, and the mass of accumu- 
lated material has become so large that it is one 
of the chief causes why historians have shrunk 
from attempting to write its history. They have 
confined themselves largely to obvious sources, 
and finding much printed material at hand, have 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 13 

been content to write their books from it. An 
original authority is of course an original author- 
ity, whether it be in print or manuscript, but for 
diplomatic history the printed material is for 
most periods a very limited and unsafe guide. 
By its very nature the records of diplomacy must 
be kept secret for a considerable period. At any 
rate, that was the doctrine of the nineteenth 
century, and though Parliament and people 
could not be denied a certain kind of information, 
that which was served up to them through the 
press and the Parliamentary papers, though often 
plentiful in bulk, was generally intended rather 
to conceal than explain what actually took place. 
But little history has been written from these 
sources alone, which is anything better than in- 
genious speculation or unashamed bookmaking. 
The most important part of the documentary 
sources for the history of English foreign policy 
lies, of course, in the archives of our own Foreign 
Office, which are now open to inspection, with 
some restrictions, down to the year i860. Only 
a very small portion of it has been printed, 
though for certain phases of our policy a good 
deal was submitted to the judgment of Parlia- 
ment and the people. These records swell into 
most formidable proportions. Some idea of their 
rate of growth may be obtained from the fact 
that while the Secretary of State for Foreign 



i 4 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

Affairs signed in 1828 five thousand dispatches, 
in 1854 the number had risen to forty-eight 
thousand. 1 When we reflect that the number of 
documents sent to the Foreign Office is neces- 
sarily largely in excess of those sent out from it, 
the dimensions of the mass of correspondence 
may be imagined to be a little intimidating. It 
is no wonder that historians have shrunk from 
the task of examining them, and have been 
tempted to take refuge in the thought that after 
all there was little to be obtained from them that 
was really important. This view has recently 
been put forward by one who has done perhaps 
as much as any living historian to make modern 
history intelligible to Englishmen. In his evid- 
ence before the Royal Commission on Public 
Records, the Vice-Chancellor of the University 
of Sheffield gave it as his considered opinion that 
little was to be obtained from the public archives 
that could not be found out from published me- 
moirs and state papers, and in a recent Review he 
expressed the same opinion with his usual felicity 
of expression. "The information so derived," he 
wrote, "though often interesting, is seldom for 
this century of primary importance. ... In 
general the harvest is first reaped by the daily 
paper, and it is only when the journalist has gar- 

1 See Sir Herbert Maxwell's Life and Letters of the fourth 
Earl of Clarendon, ii, 11. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 15 

nered the sheaves that the historian is admitted 
to the field for the gleaning - ." x 

But it should be noticed that Mr. Fisher does 
not base this sweeping statement on his own ex- 
perience, or even on a survey of all the informa- 
tion that has yet been obtained from the archives. 
His only authority is Stern's Geschichte Europas, 
a work in which the Swiss professor has tried 
to depict, not the history of European diplo- 
macy in the nineteenth century, but the whole of 
its political, social, and intellectual life. It is the 
result of much labour in many archives, but, of 
course, he can only use his materials to give, as 
it were, a top-dressing to a solid and laborious 
book. 

But though nineteenth century diplomacy has 
not yet had the services of a Maitland or a Ranke, 
yet even such work as has been done has revealed 
the immense importance of the evidence of the 
public papers. The idea that a modern statesman 
can work by the same methods as Louis XV dies 
hard, but it is untrue. The diplomacy of the 
nineteenth century was, for the most part, carried 
on by a highly-organized machine, worked by 
modern business methods. The statesman was 
thus limited by the machinery of his office. The 

1 English Historical Review, vol. xxvi, No. 104, p. 810. 
Cf. Royal Commission on Public Records, vol. i, part iii 
(Cd. 6396), Quest. 2275. 



16 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

co-operation of colleagues and subordinates was 
a first necessity of his work, and he could not 
generally instruct them verbally, or conceal from 
them the real character of his plans. This was 
especially true in a state like England, which 
was governed by a cabinet responsible to Parlia- 
ment. But it is also true to a large extent of 
more bureaucratic governments. Even Metter- 
nich, who had the instincts of a cuttlefish, and 
used ink mainly for purposes of concealment, 
could not help betraying himself, and he reveals 
the workings of his crafty mind far more in the 
instructions he wrote to his ambassadors than in 
such portions of his memoirs as we have been 
permitted to see. 

The real record of the diplomacy of the nine- 
teenth century lies then in the archives of the 
European chanceries. The care that govern- 
ments have taken and still take to conceal much 
that lies there from the eyes of the historian 
points to the same conclusion, and, however 
valuable the information we may get from private 
sources, it can only be properly interpreted in the 
light of the public papers. Nor is it necessary 
to be intimidated by their large bulk. Most of 
the papers are of course only formal documents, 
and a trained historian, with suitable clerical 
assistance can soon sift the wheat from the 
chaff. But he can only do this if he is prepared 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 17 

to undertake intensive work. A mere perambu- 
lation of the archives furnishes no clue to the 
rich stores that lie therein. 

So far such attempts as have been made to 
digest this mass of information have been ill- 
organized and spasmodic forays. This is especi- 
ally true of English historians. Though for a 
long period large portions of the English papers 
have been at the disposal of historians, their 
contents are as yet scarcely disturbed. Yet the 
material in the English Record Office is the 
most important in Europe. England developed 
a Cabinet system before any other State; her 
Foreign Minister had to reckon with his colleagues 
as well as with the favour of the Crown. Thus 
English statesmen were forced to put more truth 
on paper than those of any other country. More- 
over the organization of the English Foreign 
Office was by 181 5 far in advance of that of any 
other foreign State. In the early part of the 
century, it is true, the staff was small, and the 
Foreign Minister transacted his business largely 
through a number of secretaries, who were also 
his personal friends. His papers followed him 
about from one country house to another, and 
he left little but the most formal business to be 
carried on at the Foreign Office when he was 
away from town. But the papers were well and 
carefully kept, and probably exceed in quantity 



18 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

those of any other European capital. As yet, 
however, no systematic attempt has been made 
to find out what is in them, no official publica- 
tion has been attempted except the scanty record 
compiled by the librarians of the Foreign Office, 
and such historians as have yet used them have 
generally been content to make a hasty survey 
and then pass on. 

That this should be so is inevitable, for no 
school of research for modern history has existed 
in England until quite recent years. There has 
thus been entirely lacking any school of instruc- 
tion where the necessary preliminary training 
for such work can be obtained. It is the English 
habit to learn about things by doing them, rather 
than being taught how to do them. But it is a 
wasteful and dangerous habit, and it is rapidly 
being abandoned in all studies that are making 
definite progress. No one imagines that a scien- 
tist or an engineer can evolve naturally, without 
being taught, yet it is still assumed that anybody 
can turn his prentice hand to the writing of 
history or, at any rate, modern history. Thus 
the young student in this country, when he 
approaches his very formidable task of finding 
out from this mass of material the secrets of a 
former age, is generally entirely ignorant of 
many matters which are absolutely essential for 
the work he purposes to do. For example, he 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 19 

probably knows nothing- of international law, 
has never read through a single one of the 
great treaties of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries, and is entirely unacquainted with the 
organization of the office whose papers he pro- 
poses to read. Of palaeography, the formulae 
of documents, the various forms of diplomatic 
agreements, the use of a Protocole, or the sig- 
nificance of a Note Verbale, he is almost as 
ignorant as when he first came into the world. 
If he wishes to learn about these matters there 
is for most of them no teacher and no textbook. 
Is it any wonder if he often fails to grasp the 
significance of the documents he is reading? 
Now in Paris a school exists where such things 
can to some extent be learnt. It was largely 
created by Sorel, a master of method, and it is 
one reason why Frenchmen can make diplomatic 
history intelligible and illuminating. 

The organization of this preliminary training 
is, however, only the smallest part of the con- 
struction of a science of modern diplomatic. Our 
methods of dealing with these documents are, in 
my opinion, in need of serious consideration, and 
I trust will be radically altered. To a mediaeval 
historian a document tells much apart from its 
actual contents; the difficulties of language and 
formulae with which he is constantly faced, have 
forced him to create scientific methods of treating 



/ 

/ 



20 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

his documents. A modern historian is fortunately 
in many ways confronted with a less difficult 
task. He has not, for the most part, the same 
difficulties of handwriting and dates. His docu- 
ments have mainly been written by clerks in a 
fine round hand, though occasionally he will be 
faced with papers by some superior person which 
will make him sympathetic with the daily agonies 
of the mediaevalist. The papers of the English 
Office in the nineteenth century at any rate he 
will find little difficulty in reading, for Canning 
and Palmerston insisted on a high standard from 
their clerks, and we may hope that the tradition 
persisted down to the age of the typewriter and 
the office printing machine. But there is still 
much for him to find out from the papers which 
he cannot obtain by ordering a copyist to make 
a few extracts. He will meet with documents of 
very various kinds, and he must know exactly 
what is the character of that with which he is 
dealing. He will find there, too, many unfinished 
papers, drafts by various hands, many unsigned, 
and fair copies altered by some person or persons 
unknown. Whole passages will be scored out, 
and pencil will be freely used. Much of this is 
of course immaterial, a mere verbal fastidious- 
ness. But sometimes he can obtain from an in- 
tensive study of some particular document in- 
formation which he could not obtain from other 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 21 

sources, which illuminates, and renders intelli- 
gible, much that is otherwise dark and obscure. 
A statesman, for instance, often reveals himself 
as much by what he leaves out as in what he 
writes down, and if we can find out what he 
specially wished not to be put down in writing 
we have instantly a clue as to what was passing 
in his mind. Let me give you a simple and ob- 
vious example. A historical problem of much 
importance is the exact connection between Lord 
Castlereagh and Metternich during the critical 
years that followed the Napoleonic settlement. 
Metternich, known to historians as a liar and a 
coward, had, we know, close and intimate rela- 
tions with Castlereagh. But did the English 
minister know what he was doing, or was he the 
dupe of a cleverer man than himself? You may 
search his published letters through and through 
without finding any phrase which shows that 
Castlereagh knows the character of the man with 
whom he was dealing. But even the cool and 
cautious Castlereagh made a slip occasionally, 
and in one of his drafts be allowed himself to 
refer to the "complete double dealing" of the 
Austrian minister. Further reflection, however, 
suggested to him that this was an inopportune 
confession to make even to a capable and trusted 
ambassador, and he cut the phrase out of his 
dispatch ; but fortunately the draft was kept, and 



22 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

filed away with the office papers. Now I ven- 
ture to suggest that the evidence given here is 
of the first importance to a historian. It reveals 
more than one fact. It shows us not only that 
Castlereagh knew the character of the man with 
whom he was dealing, but that the exigencies of 
public policy made it inexpedient for him to 
communicate it to his ambassador, and such 
knowledge is highly important to the understand- 
ing of his policy, and the whole history of the 
period in which he was working. The documents 
of the Foreign Office are full of such alterations, 
yet for the most part they have been entirely 
neglected. The deductions to be made, of course, 
generally call for more refinement of thought 
than the one I have just mentioned, but that is 
no reason why one of the most important methods 
of revealing the innermost thoughts of statesmen 
should be disregarded. 

There is another kind of problem, one of the 
most difficult that faces the historian, and one 
of the most important for him to solve. Foreign 
policy is generally connected in our minds with 
the name of a single man, such as Canning or 
Clarendon; but it is generally decided by the 
joint action of several individuals. This is true, 
even of the most autocratic monarchy. It is at 
any rate true of any country like England, which 
is governed by a Cabinet. It is not too much to 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 23 

say that every English Foreign Minister has 
generally had more trouble in convincing his own 
colleagues than imposing his views on foreign 
courts; the Cabinet is always an arena of per- 
petual conflict, and its decisions are often ex- 
ceedingly unpalatable to the ministers who have 
to carry out its policy. 

Now no minister is allowed to take notes of 
Cabinet proceedings except the Prime Minister, 
who makes a brief record for submission to the 
Sovereign, and though occasionally the resigna- 
tion of a minister, or a brief passage of arms 
between former colleagues allows us to get a 
glimpse of its proceedings, yet on the whole no 
secrets in the world have been so well kept as 
those of the English Cabinet. For the historian, 
however, these secrets are obviously of first-rate 
importance. They help him to penetrate beneath 
the mask of official phrases, and to find out what 
ministers really tried to do, and what were the 
causes of their success and failure. 

Now on this sort of problem, diplomatic 
documents throw little light. How a particular 
policy was decided, what members of the Cabinet 
approved it, whether the Foreign Minister got his 
own way or not, is the last thing that a Foreign 
Minister will communicate publicly or privately 
to his subordinates. We have to rely, for the 
most part, on the untrustworthy evidence of 



24 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

memoirs and private letters. Yet often on this 
point we can find in the official papers evidence 
of the highest significance if only we look for it. 
The most important papers of the Office go the 
round of the Cabinet in those red boxes of which 
each member possesses a key. Important de- 
clarations of policy must be formulated by the 
Foreign Minister in memoranda on which other 
members of the Cabinet write or scrawl their ob- 
servations, and the drafts of the instructions to 
our ambassadors are often treated in the same 
way. No doubt many of these documents are 
lost to us. A new fair copy has been made, and 
the originals have been destroyed. But some- 
times this is not the case, and then we may have 
priceless evidence of how the Cabinet arrived at 
its decisions. Let me give you an example of 
such evidence concerning a document of immense 
importance in our own history. 

There is a famous Memorandum of 5 May 
1820, in which was made the first formal declara- 
tion of a doctrine which affected the whole of 
our foreign policy in the nineteenth century — the 
doctrine of non-intervention in the internal affairs 
of other countries. This was communicated to 
the Great Powers as a Cabinet Memorandum, 
and there is of course nothing to indicate how the 
paper was drawn up. There has been some doubt 
as to whether Castlereagh or Canning can claim 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 25 

the credit for this bold and vigorous declaration 
of policy, and the question has generally been 
decided on a priori grounds. But there exists 
in the Record Office another copy of this docu- 
ment, which is an original draft which went 
round the Cabinet. This is a very rough copy 
indeed. It has been scored and written over by 
several different hands, and radical and important 
alterations have been made in it. No less than 
fifty-three deletions or additions have to be con- 
sidered, without counting much verbal alteration. 
From this evidence it should be possible, I think, 
to come to something like a definite conclusion 
as to the views of some of the members of the 
Cabinet, to ascertain the real author of the docu- 
ment, and to reduce to their proper proportions 
the speculations and guesses of historians. And 
though evidence of such importance is of course 
only occasionally to be found in the Archives, 
yet much exists, and may often prove to be the 
only key to some difficult problem. In this con- 
nection I should mention that there is another 
important and much neglected source for ob- 
taining information as to how Cabinet decisions 
were made, in the dispatches of Foreign Am- 
bassadors, but of that I shall speak in a moment. 
There is yet another kind of problem in which 
the use of careful and scientific methods is highly 
necessary. The documents of a Foreign Office 



26 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

are not all the numbered dispatches of Foreign 
Minister or ambassador. There exists besides a 
vast miscellaneous collection of papers, the exact 
significance of which it is often hard to appreciate. 
This is especially the case with regard to docu- 
ments sent to the Foreign Minister either by his 
own ambassador or by those of other countries, 
and every chancery, owing to faulty methods of 
organization, contains large numbers of papers, 
the exact source of which is not known, and yet 
which often contain evidence of considerable im- 
portance. There are, for example, reports written 
to ambassadors by persons in their employment, 
and records of miscellaneous meetings and other 
transactions, sometimes of a rather dubious char- 
acter. It is a mistake to think that a document 
is necessarily authentic because it lies among the 
official papers. It is difficult for me to give you 
an example of the kind of error a historian may 
make, in dealing with such papers, if he is not 
careful, without going into tedious details, so 
perhaps you will forgive a rather fanciful hypo- 
thetical case drawn from recent history, which 
also rather aptly illustrates the low standards of 
our methods of dealing with modern documents. 
In 1909 Professor Friedjung, a distinguished 
historian of Vienna University, who has written 
standard works on the history of Austria in 
the nineteenth century, published in the Neue 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 27 

Freie Presse a series of articles which were 
based on the Protocoles of secret meetings of 
Serbian subjects of the Hapsburg crown. If 
these Protocoles were genuine, the men he 
accused were guilty of high treason, and Serbian 
statesmen were also convicted of treachery and 
deceit. Professor Friedjung wrote as a historian 
and not as a politician; he claimed to have sub- 
jected these documents to the ordinary tests of 
historical science and to have established their 
authenticity. Vienna was soon in a blaze, and 
that war might easily have resulted we are now 
in a position to realize. But Professor Friedjung's 
case was challenged in the courts, and after a 
most unsatisfactory trial, in which every instru- 
ment of judicial bias and intimidation was em- 
ployed on his behalf, he was forced to withdraw 
a large part of his accusations. He still main- 
tained, however, as by modern canons of criticism 
he had every right to do, that, though direct 
evidence had proved his accusations to be false, 
yet that his documentary evidence was unim- 
peachable, and that consequently his reputation 
as a historian was unimpaired. The matter, how- 
ever, did not rest here. Professor Masaryk, of the 
University of Prague, who had won his reputa- 
tion by exposing a literary forgery, took up this 
case, and by applying to the documents in ques- 
tion the more rigorous tests he had learnt in his 



28 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

own studies, he was able to show conclusively, to 
the satisfaction of all impartial critics, that the 
documents were not what they purported to be. 
Fortunately other direct evidence became avail- 
able, and it was later shown, beyond a shadow 
of doubt, that the documents had been forged in 
theAustro-Hungarian Embassy at Belgrade, and 
that Professor Friedjunghad been made the dupe 
of unscrupulous diplomatists. 1 That is a matter 
of deep significance to-day, but it has also a 
bearing on my present point. 

Suppose the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador, 
instead of forwarding these documents to Vienna 
for publication, had placed them in the archives 
of his office, and a future historian had unearthed 
them a hundred years hence. Then I venture to 
suggest that if he had employed the same methods 
which Professor Friedjung employed, that he 
would have had no doubt of the authenticity of 
the documents he had discovered, that critics 
using the same methods would have been unable 
to prove him false, and a stigma might have 
rested for all time upon perfectly innocent Serbian 
statesmen and Serbian subjects of the Austrian 
crown. 

That is an extreme case; but mistakes similar 
in kind though not in degree will continue to be 

1 See Dr. Seton-Watson's full account in his book, The 
Southern Slav Question and the Hapsburg Monarchy. 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 29 

made if modern historians cannot on occasion 
apply to the documents they handle a far more 
scientific method than they generally use to-day. 
We need, in fact, the creation of a new science 
of modern diplomatic. Fortunately, we have 
already some brilliant examples of the results 
that may be achieved by such methods; and it 
is significant of their value that the best life of 
Napoleon has been written by the historian who 
has also produced the only critical study of his 
correspondence. 

So far I have been speaking about the public 
papers, but we have also abundant evidence in 
the private collections of papers that lie in the 
muniment rooms of the great houses, whose 
sons were the chief actors in the great events of 
the nineteenth century. For these papers similar 
methods of historical research are even more 
necessary, because they are generally much less 
carefully kept. But here we are at the mercy of 
private caprice and family pride. The great 
collection of the Historical MSS. Commission 
has scarcely touched the nineteenth century, and 
though the biographies of many statesmen have 
been written, the task has too often been entrusted 
to incompetent and untrained hands. In the early 
part of the century the work was often given to 
some client of the family whose only qualification 
for the task was his subservience to its interests. 



30 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

The papers of Lord Castlereagh, for instance, 
were handled in the following manner: "In 
regard to the biography of my lamented brother," 
writes the third Marquess of Londonderry, "a 
wholly unforeseen accident has deprived me of 
that intimate fraternal correspondence for twenty- 
five successive years, which would have proved 
the most important part of any work I could 
have offered to the public. On returning from 
my Embassy to Vienna, many years since, I 
placed this collection in the hands of the Rev. S. 
Turner, who was at that time nominated and 
going out as Bishop of Calcutta. This excellent 
and invaluable divine and friend had been tutor 
to my son Castlereagh; and feeling a deep 
interest in the family, he had undertaken to 
arrange these papers, and to commence the Life 
of the Late Marquess of Londonderry. The 
vessel, however, that sailed for India with Mr. 
Turner's baggage, effects, papers, etc., was un- 
fortunately wrecked, and thus ended all my hopes 
at that period, of leaving for Posterity such a 
record of the Statesman and the Brother as I felt 
that he deserved." 

Fortunately, most collections of papers were 
treated more carefully, but the case is not without 
parallel. In later years, of course, the work has 
been better done, and a colleague or friend has 
often given us a better biography than any dry- 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 31 

as-dust historian could have done. But history 
is more important than biography, and we have 
a right to all the information the papers can give 
us. Yet there is reason to suppose that much 
evidence that would help the historian is neg- 
lected, in order that only that which serves the 
particular purpose of the biographer may be 
given to the world. These papers should be 
studied side by side with those in the public 
offices, and we cannot be content until there 
exists of every great statesman of the nineteenth 
century, such a monument of his work as we 
possess in the thirty volumes which record the 
great transactions in which the Duke of Welling- 
ton took part. But, to mention no others, neither 
Canning nor Palmerston is known to us except 
by loose and inadequate records, while the private 
papers of a hundred lesser men, particularly those 
of our ambassadors, still lie neglected and un- 
edited. 

But the whole history of English Foreign 
Policy cannot be written from the records that 
lie in this country, whether public or private. A 
Foreign minister works with the ambassadors of 
other countries besides his own. It often happens 
that in a negotiation of great importance and 
delicacy his own representative may, through 
temperament or antecedents, be an unsuitable 
medium between the two governments, and the 



32 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

ambassador of the foreign court may be used in 
his stead. If the transaction takes place by note 
or letter, a record will be left in the office, but 
much may be done by informal methods, by free 
conversation between minister and ambassador. 
To-day the Foreign Minister would make a note 
of the conversation, and file it in the office records, 
but that procedure was not regulated in England 
until late in the century. The ambassador must, 
however, make a report to his own court, and 
thus a full account of the diplomacy of our 
country cannot be made unless the documents of 
foreign archives are also consulted. For many 
purposes, indeed, these are more valuable than 
our own. A statesman can say much that he 
would never dare to put in writing; he can give 
an individual opinion, make a half proposal, or 
encourage a confidence. These will be faithfully 
reported by the ambassador, and the foundations 
laid for subsequent policy. A good ambassador, 
moreover, will have many different sources of 
information. He must ascertain and weigh the 
public opinion of the country to which he is 
accredited, and though the growth of the press 
has relieved him of some of his duties as a 
reporter, yet he must try from private sources to 
test and supplement his information. Especially 
in a state governed, like England, by a Cabinet, 
he must endeavour, by every means in his power, 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 33 

to ascertain not only the policy of the Foreign 
Minister, but that of his colleagues, and thus, 
when we endeavour to find out how far a Foreign 
Minister is really responsible for his policy during 
his tenure of office, the archives of foreign states 
furnish us with evidence of the utmost importance. 
Indeed, for the whole of our history, domestic 
and economic as well as international, they are 
sources of the highest value, for they give us an 
impartial account by a trained observer, who is 
generally in close touch with the government of 
the country. 

The importance of such evidence has naturally 
long been recognized by English historians. The 
reports of Venetian and Spanish ambassadors in 
the sixteenth century have been printed at the 
cost of the state, and are one of the principal 
sources of the period. Macaulay ransacked the 
Dutch and French archives. During the eigh- 
teenth century Parliament tried to prevent its 
discussions being reported, and sometimes the 
only record we possess is that of a foreign agent. 
For the history of the nineteenth century, how- 
ever, English historians have made very little 
use of this source of information. In this matter 
we are far behind other nations, and while our 
own search room is full of foreign students we 
send but few to perform a similar task in the 
archives of other countries. Yet this work is 



34 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

just as necessary for a full understanding of the 
history of the past century as for other periods. 
Occasionally, it is true, foreign governments 
refuse access to certain classes of papers, but in 
recent years it was easy to inspect the documents 
of the first half of the century. How far the 
present war will erect new barriers to scholarship 
it is of course impossible to say, but it may be 
that we have lost for a long time to come some 
valuable sources of information. 

Such are the unpublished sources of nineteenth 
century diplomacy, and their extent is so great 
that if they are to be explored with the thorough- 
ness they deserve, and by the methods I have 
suggested, the task can only be accomplished 
by the co-operation of many individuals. We 
must reckon our documents not by hundreds or 
thousands but by millions, and though trained 
workers can extricate what is valuable from the 
mass of worthless matter at a far faster rate 
than would be deemed possible, yet it is obvious 
that the work of one individual can avail but 
little. Unfortunately, however, in this country 
we are woefully lacking in the organization of 
historical study. 

In the first place we are given no assistance 
from the State. The Record Office is indeed 
issuing calendars and other volumes at a fairly 
steady rate, but it has as yet scarcely penetrated 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 35 

into the eighteenth century. The government 
could not, of course, publish the modern records 
on the same scale. But it might at least — and 
it could be done at small expense — give us a 
reasonable catalogue raisonne of the documents 
in our own archives. A historian working in 
the Archives des affaires etrangeres is saved 
an immense amount of time by the assistance 
of its scientific catalogue, and the same work 
should be done in London. 

In one matter of great importance we must 
depend entirely on official action. If real intensive 
work is to be done on the Records, a catalogue 
of handwritings must be made, so that we may 
make the most of the evidence that ministers 
have often inadvertently left behind them. The 
progress of modern photography has made such 
a task a simple matter. Yet since 1830, when 
there was published in Paris an elaborate Iso- 
graphie des hommes celebres, nothing of the kind 
has been attempted, and historians are deprived 
of an important means of finding out truth. 

Still more essential for the progress of modern 
historical science in this country is the develop- 
ment of more organized and combined efforts 
by scholars for the publication and criticism of 
documents and studies. In no subject is co- 
operation so essential, and in none is there so 
little existent, For his bibliography, and even 



36 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

for publication of his material, the English his- 
torian has to rely in a large measure on foreign 
journals, which, of course, only supply his wants 
inadequately. It is not surprising that English 
historians have too often neglected obvious 
sources of information, and that much time is 
wasted upon publishing documents that are 
already in print. By such methods progress is 
impossible, and we shall achieve much if we can 
imitate the methods of the more exact sciences, 
and erect suitable machinery to compare and 
classify our results. Fortunately, here also there 
is much progress to record in recent years. Since 
1910 a Royal Commission has been considering 
the organization and publication of our records, 
and it has already produced most valuable re- 
sults. A Committee of historians is now co- 
operating with our archivists, and lending valu- 
able assistance to their sorely pressed forces. 
We may even hope that something will be done 
for those of us that believe that the nineteenth 
century is as worthy of scientific study as any 
other period. 

Further, two recent examples of co-operative 
history have produced deep and striking results. 
The Cambridge Modern History, if it has fallen 
far short in many respects of the ideals sketched 
by Lord Acton, "is beyond comparison the 
best survey of the modern world in any Ian- 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 37 

guage," 1 and it has provided the first comprehen- 
sive bibliography of modern history. Moreover, 
at the present time a group of English and 
American scholars are co-operating in the pro- 
duction of a bibliography of Modern English 
History, which promises to be a more than worthy 
rival to Dahlmann-Waitz, and in which a com- 
prehensive survey of the unwritten sources will 
be a characteristic feature. We may thus hope 
that the work will be done without which the task 
of interpreting to the English people the story of 
the most important century in their annals cannot 
be attempted. 

I may have seemed to you in this survey to 
have laid too much stress on the detailed charac- 
ter of the work involved, to have tried to turn the 
most living and inspiring of sciences into a drab 
and purposeless mass of research. Such was far 
from my purpose. Though history will always 
be incapable of exact interpretation, since no 
scale has yet been invented to weigh human 
motives and character, which are the main object 
of its study, yet it is a study of organized indi- 
viduals, and it is possible to make large generali- 
zations of the utmost possible value to the human 
race. But these generalizations will only have 
value when they are based on a thorough and 

1 G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth 
Century. 



38 NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

searching- inquiry into all the available sources. 
We must plot our curves before we draw them. 
We must ascertain how much we can know before 
we speculate upon the unknowable. Each great 
event of history is a bundle of small events, in- 
tricate, complicated, and obscure. Progress is 
made, not by ignoring, but by reconciling, con- 
flicting evidence, and our hypotheses must be able 
to stand the same tests as those of the natural 
sciences. Nothing is more false and misleading 
than an endeavour to make clear and simple that 
which is not really so. When a thousand mono- 
graphs, and the patient and concerted work of 
scholars has cleared the ground, then there will 
be a real chance for synthesis, and we shall be 
ready for the great historian, who can take our 
results, and weave them into one homogeneous 
whole. But, meanwhile, there is plenty of work 
for humbler men, and each of us in his own 
sphere may have the satisfaction of knowing that 
he is contributing to a work that is essential to 
the progress of modern society. But that work 
will only be achieved when modern historians 
take to themselves the messages that Maitland, 
the most imaginative, the most scientific, and 
the most successful of all recent historians, gave 
to students of mediaeval history: " There are 
discoveries to be made, but there are also habits 
to be formed." 



NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 39 

I believe such principles to be true of all 
history. It is difficult to apply them to the study 
of nineteenth century diplomacy, where there is 
so much to be done and so few people to do it. 
It does not, of course, matter for its own sake 
whether we know exactly every twist and turn of 
its tortuous course. But each little fragment of 
truth is related to other fragments, and the true 
history of the century can never be written until 
we have pieced it together bit by bit. 

And if such work is worth doing at all, it is 
surely important that some small part of it should 
be done in this city of Liverpool, the smoke of 
whose steamers is to be seen upon every ocean 
even now at a time of world-wide war. For 
though coal and cotton, a damp climate and a 
broad estuary may have created the greatness of 
Liverpool and the Lancashire behind it, yet the 
direction of its energies, and the ebb and flow of 
its trade, has been largely influenced by the work 
of statesmen and diplomatists. No other city so 
clearly typifies the fact that England is bound by 
countless ties to every country in the world, its 
citizens have more than once decided the fate of 
lands across the seas. George Canning, who has 
been described as England's greatest Foreign 
Minister in the nineteenth century, was once 
burgess of this city, and historians have not been 



4 o NINETEENTH CENTURY DIPLOMACY 

slow to point out that one of the causes of his 
success was that he had learned much from his 
constituents. I do not doubt that the same 
instruction will not be denied to me, and I trust 
that I shall be carrying* out the wishes of the 
generous founders of this Chair, if the Andrew 
Geddes and John Rankin Professor of Modern 
History, so far as in him lies, endeavours, 
amongst his many other duties, to see that the 
study of nineteenth century diplomacy is not 
neglected in this city. 



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